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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

"Dear contributors, friends and fans: the release is here! Eight months of planning, packaging, adding features, fixing issues, testing and fixing more issues has brought you the best that free and open source has to offer, with our green touch: stable and awesome. This release did benefit from the improvements to our testing infrastructure and much attention to bug fixing. While a combination of over 6,000 packages supporting 5 architectures can never be perfect, we're proud to say this really does represent the best free software has to offer! The latest desktops (five of them!), server and cloud technologies, software development tools and everything in between are included."

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 5

Pros:

It works on some computers

Cons:

but certainly not on all

I tested the 32-bit version of OpenSUSE with both the KDE live disk and a net-install of Xfce. Version 12 had taken two days to set up and this was worse.

My video driver was broken, and so was Lightdm (used by Xfce), so I had to do a lot of fixing from the CLI. If you start the live disk in CLI mode, the installer sets the installation to boot in the same way. It does this by configuring Grub rather than systemd, so it took some time to solve that problem. The installer gets your name and password, but doesn’t create a user; that is done by YaST at first boot, but only if you boot directly into a GUI. I also found that choosing to put grub on the root partition did not prevent a second copy being installed on the MBR.

Xfce came without Catfish or the menu editor. The software included Firefox, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Gimp, Shotwell, Rhythmbox, Totem, and Libreoffice. Several programs gave critical warnings in connection with glib and Shotwell had no help installed.

KDE was very bloated and used 40% of my CPU until I reconfigured it, after which it still used 1GB of RAM when idle. The software included had Kmail, Kopete, and Amorok replacing their Gnome equivalents, but no Gimp or media player. I installed Dragon, but playback was too slow to be usable. I also had no ethernet. Yast listed my ethernet twice under different names, had no help, and nothing I did worked. Eventually I solved that by using the network manager daemon, which had been disabled.

A lot of people use SUSE happily: if you have a recent computer, Nvidia or ATI graphics, and stick to KDE, it will work. For others, it may be the distro from hell.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 2

Pros:

Lovely Installer. I love the Geeko

Cons:

PackageKit

Been using Debian and derivatives ever since I started with linux (about a year or so). Decided to try something new, someone suggested OpenSuse. Downloaded both the Gnome and KDE live versions. Popped them on a flash drive and away I went. The installer was the nicest one I've seen yet on any linux I've used. Very well laid out. It was a breeze and very intuitive I thought. Once inside the installed system though things stopped.

PackageKit, some unknown process that I didn't start or had ever heard about had taken over my system. It wouldn't let me add / remove / upgrade / update my software at all. Just kept telling me the process was locked. I let both of them sit for over an hour and still no dice (Fedora 20 did this to me as well).

They seem nice enough, the distros backed by commercial companies usually are... but if you can't install any software whats the point. Can't speak to anything beyond that as that was as far as I got. Packagekit ruined it for me. I'm going back to Debian, or whatever. Something that doesn't have packagekit.

*EDIT* I have since learned that there is console magic to turn it off and get rid of it but it seems stupid since the average new user will not even know what to google for much less how to get that thing turned off so they can use the package manager.

As my signature states, I think I found the distro to end my distrohopping madness.&lt;br&gt;
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Best points overall are definitely the installer, which is by far the best one i have encountered, then next the integration of KDE, which is wonderful and YaST. YaST is a really near-perfect one-stop shop GUI for everything you want to set up on your system, without editing the text files in your / directory.&lt;br&gt;
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On the other hand, YaST can seem a little bloated sometimes, especially its GTK version. &lt;br&gt;
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It doesn't use too much of my system's resources (a 4-5 years old dual core Pentium + 4gb of RAM ).&lt;br&gt;
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It looks great, and it's very very reliable.&lt;br&gt;
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And one of the great things is that openSUSE hits the sweetest possible spot between corporate sponsorship, giving back upstream, cross-distro collaboration, openness...&lt;br&gt;
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I'd also recommend it to any beginner, as yes, there's a lot of third-party apps in OBS, but you can install them with a single click from software.opensuse.org.&lt;br&gt;
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The best distro I've used to this day.